StudentAdvisor.com Releases “Top 100 Social Media Colleges” List

Research reveals surprising results and includes data input from HubSpot

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Did you say social media? Top 100 Colleges? Can you say, “Who ARE the Top 100 Social Media Colleges?” Today, StudentAdvisor.com announced the inaugural list of Top 100 Social Media Colleges – some of the results may surprise you!

“Who ARE the Top 100 Social Media Colleges?”

StudentAdvisor.com is part of the Avenue100 Media Solutions Inc. family of information products and services and Avenue100 Media Solutions Inc. is a subsidiary of The Washington Post Company.

TOP 10 COLLEGES ARE A SURPRISING MIX

And they are: Harvard University (1), Johns Hopkins University (2), United States Military Academy (3), Carnegie Mellon University (4), University of Notre Dame (5), Stanford University (6), Columbia University, (7), University of Miami (8), University of Florida (9) and rounding out the Top 10 is University of Oregon. At the other end of the scale is Union University (96), Saint Mary’s College (97), Allegheny College (98), Millsaps College (99) and University of Georgia (100).

“The most surprising findings were in the incredibly diverse ways the colleges engage in social media,” said Dean Tsouvalas, Editor-in-Chief of StudentAdvisor.com. “We were pleasantly surprised by the rankings of Emerson College (13), the U.S. Military Academy (3) and Spelman College (16). Or, the #1 school – Harvard University. We would not have known they were the top social media communities without having researched and established the list.”

THE RESEARCH BEHIND THE RANKINGS OR – HOW DID THEY DO IT?

According to Katherine Godfrey, Ph.D., Principal Scientist for Avenue100 Media, they started with a comprehensive list of more than six thousand post-secondary degree-granting institutions in the U.S. for which they had compiled information for the StudentAdvisor site. Next, they researched Facebook¹ fan pages, Twitter² accounts and other social media sites associated with each of those schools.

The team then restricted the rankings to include only those schools that met the following criteria:

1.	Facebook pages that had at least 500 fans
2.	Each college had to have at least one such Facebook fan page and at least one Twitter account in order to be included in the rankings
3.	They removed colleges where they could not verify the total enrollment information

To arrive at the inaugural list, the data included total Facebook fan counts, total number and effectiveness of Twitter followers among other factors. During the course of the list compilation, the team is regularly re-measuring and updating the data by revisiting the various Facebook, Twitter, and other social media pages.

HUBSPOT INSTRUMENTAL IN TOP 100 RANKINGS RESEARCH

“HubSpot is our blog platform provider and hosts The StudentAdvisor.com blog,” said Tsouvalas. “They provide us with informative analytics and ways to constantly improve our conversations with students, parents and colleges. We gave them the list of colleges’ Twitter accounts and they provided the Twitter grades from TwitterGrader.com.”

Tsouvalas continued, “Twitter Grader is a free tool that allows you to check the power of your Twitter profile compared to millions of other users that have been graded. This is a terrific, unbiased baseline for evaluating each school’s Twitter account. Scores ranged from a high of 100 to a low of 10.”

For more information or additional research details regarding the Top 100 Social Media Schools rankings list, please contact Diane Moore via email at [e-mail] or by phone at [phone].

StudentAdvisor.com’s Editor-in-Chief Dean Tsouvalas and other Avenue100 Media Solutions executives are available for interviews upon request.

STUDENTADVISOR.COM RESOURCES:

Top 100 Social Media Schools: http://www.studentadvisor.com/top-100-social-media-colleges
Website: http://www.StudentAdvisor.com
Blog: http://blog.StudentAdvisor.com/
Twitter http://twitter.com/StudentAdvisor
Facebook http://www.facebook.com/StudentAdvisor

ABOUT STUDENTADVISOR.COM

StudentAdvisor.com is the leading “all things education” comparison resource for students, parents and lifetime learners. StudentAdvisor.com empowers college students of all ages to choose which college is the best fit for their individual short and long-term career path, academics, financial situation and budget, and personality. StudentAdvisor.com is part of the Avenue100 Media Solutions Inc. family of information products and services. Avenue100 Media Solutions Inc. is a subsidiary of The Washington Post Company. For more information, visit StudentAdvisor.com. Please contact us for additional information. Product and executive images are available upon request.

ABOUT AVENUE100 MEDIA SOLUTIONS INC.

Avenue100 Media Solutions is a leading analytics-based performance marketing company that helps institutions acquire qualified customers. Its flagship site, CourseAdvisor.com, was founded in 2004 by a group of successful entrepreneurs and alumni from MIT and the University of Massachusetts/Amherst. CourseAdvisor is now one of the top education sites in the country according to Quantcast, with over 3.3 million unique visitors per month.

In 2007, CourseAdvisor was acquired by the Washington Post Company, becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of the Company. The minds behind CourseAdvisor launched the WashingtonPost Education web site in 2007 and a financial aid web site, EducationGrant.com, in 2008. In 2009, Avenue100 Media Solutions was formed to serve as a holding company for the numerous sites that the team manages. Avenue100 is headquartered just outside of Boston, Massachusetts. For more information, visit Avenue100.com.

ABOUT HUBSPOT

HubSpot, Inc. offers an all-in-one marketing software platform for small and medium-sized businesses. Over 4,000 companies in 31 countries use HubSpot software to increase the number of visitors to their website and convert more of those visitors to leads and customers. Applications in the software platform include website management, blogging, search engine optimization, lead management, marketing analytics, email marketing, landing pages, and social media monitoring. HubSpot is also the developer of the popular website analysis tool, WebsiteGrader.com, which has over 3 million users.

HubSpot, Inc. was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For more information, visit HubSpot.com.

LEGAL:

¹ Facebook(R) is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc.
² Twitter (R) is a registered trademark of Twitter Inc.
©2011, the Top 100 Social Media Colleges (List & Rankings) are the exclusive copyright of StudentAdvisor.com, Avenue100 Media Solutions, Inc., all rights reserved.

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